by Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

by Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

The women who think they've found paradise by a New Zealand lake are clearly wrong - but viewers might not be.

Certainly, anyone who's felt TV has been in a bit of a lull of late now has reason to once again fire up the DVR, because this is a series you'll want to watch -- and maybe even rewatch -- each week.

Written and co-directed by Oscar-winning writer Jane Campion, who reunites with her Oscar-winning star Holly Hunter, Top of the Lake is rivetingly odd, almost oppressively atmospheric and thoroughly entrancing. None of that should surprise anyone who saw Campion and Hunter's work together in The Piano; the surprise is simply that Campion has returned to TV (where she started), and has done so with all her gifts and eccentricities as a writer intact.

Yet Campion, Hunter and the gorgeous New Zealand scenery that gives this often-dark drama both its otherworldly shimmer and sustained sense of menace are not the only draws Lake has to offer. There's also a standout, far-from-Mad-Men star turn by Elisabeth Moss, who is so good as the quietly damaged detective at the center of this story that she alone would be worth the time investment this short-run, seven-part mystery requires.

Whether she completely nails the Down Under accent is something those Down Under will have to answer, but she has the character, and the star power, down pat.

Moss is Robin Griffin, an Australia-based police detective who returns home to New Zealand to visit her ailing mother. While she's there, a pregnant 12-year-old girl, Tui Mitcham, goes missing. For reasons that will become clearer later, Robin finds herself drawn to the case - aided, and sometimes hindered, by the handsome head of the local police station (David Wenham).

Trapped in an area that is rich in natural beauty and poor in almost every other regard, Robin finds she is awash in suspects. Those include Tui's reprobate brothers and her even-worse, drug-lord father, a terrifically written part, well-played by Peter Mullan as equal parts charismatic and demented.

Soon enough, we find that Tui's disappearance ties into Robin's own troubled past. As for her future, that's tied to a kind of halfway-house women's encampment on the lake at Paradise, headed by the weirdly enigmatic GJ, and played by Hunter at her most weirdly enigmatic. Out of context (and maybe even in it), the performance and the character would almost certainly be divisive, but they work within the hothouse confines of the series.

Secrets, crimes and whispers build to the point where they could become too much, as they are in A&E's Bates Motel, also premiering tonight. But the pacing is so deliberate, and the world Campion has created seems so real and yet, somehow, so detached and different from our own, that the characters and incidents ring true.

To be sure, some of them also ring as unoriginal. There are only so many ways to solve and prolong a mystery, and some of those chosen by Lake owe a bit too much to Prime Suspect and The Killing. (An early red herring is particularly, unpleasantly Killing-ish.) Even so, what distinguishes Lake is its remarkable sense of place and its unexpected flashes of humor, all tied to Campion's own view of women and the world.

Clearly, as those rehabbing women have discovered, that does not mean it's wise to live in Paradise. But for seven weeks, it's going to be a fabulous place to visit.